I’m leafing through some readers’ questions. Many seem a little abstract, as if they had been composed during the summer doldrums at the cottage. Here’s one that’s outright metaphysical:

“You have written you aren’t an atheist, George, but you’ve also written you’re not religious. Don’t you have to be one or the other?”

Well, no. I’m not an atheist for the same reason I’m not a theist. A believer, whatever his religion, must assume there is a God, while a denier must assume there isn’t. I don’t know enough to assume one way or the other. To be a denier requires the same faith in the non-existence of a higher being as a believer requires for a higher being’s existence. A person needs more faith than I have for both belief and denial.

Not having enough faith to be either an atheist or a believer, I’m an agnostic. This means having faith in not knowing enough for an opinion on creation’s mystery.

Anyone capable of such party discipline wouldn’t be a maverick like Trump and would hardly achieve the profile he has achieved

The next reader’s question is quite different — but on second thought, maybe it isn’t. He, too, asks about my belief in something I couldn’t possibly know, and I doubt if anyone could.

This reader writes: “I bet you’re one of those snotty people who think Donald Trump can’t be elected president of the United States.”

Hmm. Actually, I’m one of those snotty people who thinks he can be, although it’s a hell of a long shot, even in America. I must admit that, as recently as a few months ago, I thought of Donald Trump only as a joke, or at most as Hillary Clinton’s secret weapon, the man who might do for her presidency what Ross Perrot did for her husband’s.

Trump, whether he’s worth $10 billion or only $4 billion, is rich enough to finance a run for the presidency as a third-party candidate, perhaps sucking away enough Republican votes to assure Clinton’s victory if the Democrats nominate her, which is all but certain at this point. What is far from certain, but increasingly possible, is that Donald may not have to run under the flag of his billions alone. As the summer wears on, the Republicans may decide to hold their snotty noses and actually nominate Donald the Clown to carry the elephantine banner into battle, in the hope of seeing him prevail over Clinton’s asinine troops.

Is that what I think will happen? Well, in the best of all possible worlds, Trump’s unexpected showing would spur the Republicans into selecting a candidate who is able to run with the issues he put on the agenda, but run with them in more respectable ways. In such a world, Trump would acquiesce to his party’s choice and support a plausible candidate, in exchange for a cabinet post or committee chairmanship of some kind.

But this isn’t the best of all possible worlds. Anyone capable of such party discipline wouldn’t be a maverick like Trump and would hardly achieve the profile he has achieved. The person who might accept such a deal from his party elders is unlikely to find himself in a position to be offered it.

This leaves the following alternatives, in order of probability:

1. the Trump volcano cools and subsides as the campaign wears on as inexplicably as it erupted;

2. Trump does a Ross Perrot with the same results, handing the presidency to the next Clinton in line;

3. Trump runs as an independent and actually wins, bringing America under the management of the nearest thing to Barnum and Bailey;

4. Trump defies another set of odds and gets the Republican nomination — then loses ignominiously against Lady MacClinton;

5. Trump does the ultimate improbable, gets the Republican nomination and wins, bringing America under the management of the Ringling Brothers and their Pachyderms; and

6. the remotest possibility, that both Democrats and Republicans come to their senses and nominate candidates other than Clinton and Trump, and have a serious election instead of a circus.

Related

“Mr. Jonas, do you agree,” the next correspondent asks, “that Islam stands for peace and mercy?”

Well, all major religions stand for peace and mercy, which never stopped some of their followers from acting in bellicose and merciless ways. Christianity stands for turning the other cheek, but this didn’t prevent Christian rulers from launching nine crusades between the 11th and 13th centuries to wrest the Holy Land from Islam.

In our days it’s Islam that has been influenced by a militant and crusading spirit. Opinions may vary as to why this is so, but closing one’s eyes to it is daft. So is responding in kind. After 9/11, when the bodies of nearly 3,000 Americans lay mixed with cement dust in lower Manhattan, some people were tempted to turn the Muslim mobs that cheered the devastation into a similar substance. It seemed easier than hunting down terrorists: it’s always simpler to set fire to a haystack than to look for a needle in it. To the credit of Western civilization (as I wrote at the time), this option was never even contemplated.

NP GRAPHICSCLICK OR TAP TO ENLARGE: From 'cheerful' chatter to 'screams in the final seconds,' what happened in the cockpit of Germanwings Flight 9525.

So it looks deliberate. On Thursday morning, French prosecutors said their working theory is that the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 deliberately crashed the plane into the Alps on Tuesday. The news comes hard on the heels of Wednesday night’s chilling report from The New York Times that the captain had left the cockpit and was unable to get back in. The Times story quoted an official involved in the investigation:

“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door, and there is no answer,” the investigator said. “And then he hits the door stronger, and no answer. There is never an answer…. You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”

Now here’s a statement from prosecutor Brice Robin: “The co-pilot through voluntary abstention refused to open the door of the cockpit to the commander, and activated the button that commands the loss of altitude.” The co-pilot’s intention, Robin said, was “to destroy the aircraft.” He was alive at the moment of impact.

The chilling part is that the theory, if true, illustrates the ease with which the very devices created to make flights safer can be turned against their purpose. One of the pilots left the cockpit for perfectly innocent reasons, and then, when the emergency arose, couldn’t get back in because the security design worked against him.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, federal law has required that the cockpit be protected by “a rigid door in a bulkhead between the flight deck and the passenger area to ensure that the door cannot be forced open from the passenger compartment.” The door must “remain locked while any such aircraft is in flight except when necessary to permit access and egress by authorized persons.” The door may be unlocked with a key, but the key may not be possessed “by any member of the flight crew who is not assigned to the flight deck.” Most airlines around the world comply with those U.S. rules.

According to its operating manual, the A320, like most passenger aircraft, has an electronic keypad that can be used to unlock the door. As a standard security measure, however, such keypads can be disabled by the pilots.

That’s the point. Whoever is in the cockpit can lock everyone else out. This makes sense if one is trying to prevent a hijacking. It becomes a problem when the pilot turns out to be the bad guy. In the case of Flight 9525, if the prosecutors are right, the co-pilot, determined to crash the plane, would have disabled the keypad, making egress impossible in the time remaining.

These events stand as a chilling reminder of how difficult it is to harden our systems entirely against attack. The human factor is always a variable for which we cannot fully account. Eric Schlosser, in his book “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, tells us how planners agonized for decades over how to prevent a crazed individual from stealing or detonating a nuclear weapon. Even if guarded against outsiders, the systems couldn’t be completely protected against insiders. His chilling conclusion is that the problem was never really solved: We’ve just been lucky.

It’s likely that pilots have been locked out of cockpits before, but always by accident. Their colleagues doubtless have let them back in, and nobody’s given the matter another thought. Probably the incidents were never even logged. Even if they had been, it’s not likely much would have changed. As the sociologist Charles Perrow notes in his book Normal Accidents, we rarely take precautions against incidents that seem trivial at the time they occur.

In hindsight, we can now see the cost of the security we’ve put into place. But there’s no obvious fix. Plainly we can’t forbid pilots to leave the flight deck — nature may always call. And having gone to all this trouble to harden cockpit doors, it would be silly to begin softening them again. The deployment of some sort of emergency unlocking device would be asking for trouble.

Maybe someone will come up with a clever and effective solution. But no matter how layered and complex our security systems, we’ll never be able to remove the human element. And there is always the risk that an insider will thwart the system.

Bloomberg News

Stephen L. Carter is a law professor at Yale.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/stephen-l-carter-why-the-door-was-locked-on-germanwings-flight-9525/feed2stdcrash-21NP GRAPHICSfbNewfoundland officials plead with residents to stop calling new 911 service to see if it workshttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/newfoundland-officials-plead-with-residents-to-stop-calling-new-911-service-to-see-if-it-works
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Only two days after it rolled out province-wide 911 service, Newfoundland and Labrador officials are pleading with citizens to stop calling 911 just to see if it works.

“The more people hear about it, the more likely they are to try and test it,” said Bradley Power, spokesman with Newfoundland and Labrador’s Fire and Emergency services. “There have been a couple, and we just want to make sure that it doesn’t escalate.”

Last week, an official government release warned 911 newbies to “refrain from testing the service (i.e. calling and hanging up).”

On Monday, Newfoundland and Labradorians also heard from Vince Mackenzie, president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Fire Services. In a CBC broadcast he said “it’s up, it’s running. You don’t need to check.”

“My message today is to remind everyone not to phone 911 unless there is an emergency,” he told the National Post.

On Sunday, Newfoundland and Labrador launched province-wide 911 service for the first time. Previously, only 40% of its 527,000 people could call 911 in an emergency.

‘My message today is to remind everyone not to phone 911 unless there is an emergency’

Everyone else, meanwhile, was expected to dial the seven-digit number of their local police detachment, fire station or ambulance dispatch.

The Atlantic province is right to be wary.

In the other 911-serviced regions of Canada, test calls are a common headache for emergency dispatchers — particularly when rural regions are freshly introduced to the system.

“It certainly happens,” said Jody Robertson, spokeswoman with E-Comm, the agency that answers most of B.C.’s 911 calls.

“We’ve had people testing out their new phone, which is not something that we want people to do because it takes time away from real 911 calls.”

The exact number of test callers is not known, but the problem warranted official mention in a 911 fact sheet put out by Emergency Management B.C. “Please don’t call 911 just to see if it works,” it reads.

A similar warning was issued by Calgary to stem a growing rash of unnecessary emergency calls.

“Children who learn about 9-1-1 is school are sometimes tempted to ‘test’ 9-1-1,” reads a City of Calgary brochure. “Please teach your children to call 9-1-1 in an emergency and never place a test call to 9-1-1.”

Users of Internet-based phones are also regular sources of 911 test calls.

There have also been several high-profile incidents in which 911 dispatchers received improper information from an online phone. In one case, a Calgary toddler died after his family’s web phone forwarded the emergency call to Ontario, causing a critical 20-minute delay in the arrival of paramedics.

In British Columbia, at least, E-Comm will occasionally authorize test calls with large companies or service providers, but never with individual phone owners, said Ms. Robertson.

Although 911 is taken for granted in Canada’s urban area, large swaths of its sparsely populated rural areas remain outside the reach of 911 operators.

“It’s a real simple answer — we don’t have 911,” said Kevin Brezinski, director of public safety for the Northwest Territories.

If Yellowknife residents need the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, they have to call (867) 669-1111. If their house is on fire, however, the emergency number is (867) 873-2222. The emergency numbers change, depending on the community.

As Newfoundland and Labrador laid the groundwork for its new system, an official study promised it would allow tourists, children and the occupants of burning homes to call for help without getting confused.

“We’re going to find out who did this and we’re going to kick their ass,” U.S. President George W. Bush said from his cabin on the plane — according to one of dozens of tweets written Thursday by former White House press secretary to commemorate the 13th anniversary of 9/11. “Somebody is going to pay for it,” Bush reportedly said later.

Taken together, Ari Fleischer’s tweets and photos provide an extensive play-by-play from inside the Bush brain trust on the day of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

“I got a page on my pager (we didn’t have blackberries then and the iPhone hadn’t been invented), telling me a plane hit 9/11,” reads one of Mr. Fleischer’s posts, which begin with President Bush reading to schoolchildren while news of the terrorist attack broke.

Many of the tweets come from Mr. Fleischer’s notes taken throughout that day.

“I have some 6 pages of notes on a legal pad,” he tweeted Thursday. “The originals are in a bank vault now.”

Fleischer, who preluded the 9/11 “live tweeting” with several critical posts about U.S. President Barack Obama’s handling of the ISIS terrorist threat, currently runs a communications company that works with sporting organizations and athletes.

Read Mr. Fleischer’s tweets:

8:40am, 9-11, 2001: I was in the motorcade 4 the drive from the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort in Sarasota, FL 2the Emma Booker Elem. School.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/somebodys-going-to-pay-george-w-bushs-press-secretary-relives-911-in-a-day-long-series-of-tweets/feed6std"POTUS left the event and went into the holding room 2get briefed/ work the phones. Here is a picture of the scene."America pauses for moment of reflection to mark 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attackshttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/america-pauses-for-moment-of-reflection-to-mark-13th-anniversary-of-the-911-attacks
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With the toll of a bell and a solemn moment of silence, America paused Thursday to mark the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attack.

Stephen Albert, whose father Jon died during the attacks, kicked off reading the names of the nearly 3,000 people killed in New York, at the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. He said his dad was a dedicated father, husband and respected colleague.

“He will be sorely missed,” he said.

The sad roll call was to pause only four times: to mark the times when the first plane struck the World Trade Center, when the second plane struck, when the first tower fell and when the second tower fell.

Thelma Stuart, whose husband Walwyn Wellington Stuart, Jr., 28, was a Port Authority Police Department officer, said the nation should pray for its leaders, “that God will grant them wisdom, knowledge and understanding on directing them on moving forward.”

Little about the annual ceremony at ground zero has changed. But so much around it has.

AP Photo/Jason DeCrowJose Colon, of New York, looks up at 1 World Trade Center before a ceremony marking the 13th anniversary of 9/11 attacks.

AP Photo/Carol OrazemA pair of boots with melted soles that Carol Orazem wore while working at the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks of 2001. She's donated the boots to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

For the first time, the National Sept. 11 Memorial Museum — which includes gut-wrenching artifacts and graphic photos of the attacks — will be open on the anniversary. Fences around the memorial plaza have come down, integrating the sacred site more fully with the streets of Manhattan while completely opening it up to the public and camera-wielding tourists.

A new mayor is in office, Bill de Blasio, one far less linked to the attacks and their aftermath than his immediate predecessors. And finally, a nearly completed One World Trade Center has risen 1,776 feet above ground zero and will be filled with office workers by this date in 2015, another sign that a page in the city’s history may be turning.

On Thursday, New Yorkers went about their morning routines along sidewalks that were once cordoned off. Inside the plaza, families milled quietly.

[ustream id=522594 live=1 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=940 height=556]

Franklin Murray of New York wore a shirt with a photo of his brother, Harry Glen, and the words “our angel” above the photo and “the wind beneath our wings” below. Glen worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the companies most decimated.

He said he wanted to see the memorial for the first time, and it gave him a “funny feeling” to know there was now a memorial. He has come to the ceremony before but “before it was getting harder, so I forced myself to get down here.”

For some who lost loved ones in the attacks, the increasing feel of a return to normalcy in the area threatens to obscure the tragedy that took place there and interfere with their grief.

“Instead of a quiet place of reflection, it’s where kids are running around,” said Nancy Nee, whose firefighter brother, George Cain, was killed in the attacks. “Some people forget this is a cemetery. I would never go to the Holocaust museum and take a selfie.”

But for others, the changes are an important part of the healing process.

“When I first saw [One World Trade Center], it really made my heart sing,” said Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles Burlingame was the pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. “It does every time I see it because it’s so symbolic of what the country went through.”

“I want to see it bustling,” she said. “I want to see more housing down there; I want to see it alive and bursting with businesses.”

The memorial plaza will be closed to the public for most of the day and available only to family members. It will reopen at 6 p.m., at which point thousands of New Yorkers are expected to mark the anniversary at the twin reflecting pools where the towers once stood.

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty ImagesBarack Obama, Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden stand for a moment of silence on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., Thursday.

In May, when the museum opened in a ceremony attended by President Barack Obama, the fences that had surrounded the plaza for years disappeared, as did the need for visitors to obtain a timed ticket. Now, thousands of people freely visit every day, from cellphone-toting travelers to workers on a lunch break, and those crowds will only swell further this year when One World Trade Center finally opens.

The first ceremony at the site was held six months after the Twin Towers fell and was organized by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his aides. Bloomberg, who took office just three months after the attacks, remained in charge, acting as the master of ceremonies for the next decade. He attended on Thursday.

After other elected officials attempted to gain a larger role at the solemn event, in 2012, all politicians – including Bloomberg – were prohibited from speaking at the event. That remains the case now.

AP Photo/Charles DharapakThe White House marks the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Chang W. Lee - Pool/Getty ImagesNY-Port Authority Police Officer Donna Przybyszewski takes a moment to herself before family members are let in for the memorial observances.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper today issued the following statement on the anniversary of 9/11 and to mark Canada’s National Day of Service:

“On September 11th, 2001, a group of terrorists targeting New York and the heart of the U.S. Government silenced the futures of nearly 3,000 innocent citizens from the United States and around the world – including 24 Canadians.

“To the people who mourn their loss most profoundly, the friends and families of the victims, Laureen and I offer our respect, our condolences and hope that you find comfort in the fact that Canadians remember that awful day and grieve with you.

“A key lesson of 9/11 is to remain vigilant against terror groups and regimes that seek to establish safe havens such as the one which existed in Afghanistan prior to 2001, where the 9/11 perpetrators were allowed to thrive.

“While 9/11 will forever be remembered for the senseless nature of the attacks, it is important to recall that in the midst of terror and destruction, there was also enormous compassion, giving, bravery, and generosity to eclipse that darkness.

“There were waves of first responders who selflessly risked their lives in the aftermath of the attacks. There was the service of volunteers – military and civilian alike – and the generosity of many more who lent a hand as Good Samaritans. Canadians in Gander, Newfoundland, and a number of other communities hosted several thousand diverted air passengers, treating these stranded people like family and friends, inviting them into their community and into their homes.

“It is in honour and celebration of these acts of kindness that Canada designated September 11th as our National Day of Service in 2011, a day in which charitable deeds, fundraisers and community service can act as an antithesis to the inhumane acts committed 13 years ago.

“Canadians continue to step up in times of catastrophe and hardship – whether the front lines happen to be in their community, in this country, or somewhere else in the world – to contribute their time, energy and personal resources to improve the lives of those less fortunate. It is a cherished value that is at the very heart of what it means to be Canadian, a value that shows no signs of abating regardless of the challenge.”

AP Photo/Andrew BurtonSam Pulia, mayor of Westchester, Ill., and a former police officer of the same town, mourns over the name of his cousin, New York firefighter Thomas Anthony Casoria, who was killed in the South Tower in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Justin Lane- Pool/Getty ImagesWhite roses in an inscribed name along the edge of the North Pool during memorial observances Thursday.

AP Photo/Mark LennihanThe Tribute in Light rises behind the Brooklyn Bridge and buildings adjacent to the World Trade Center complex Wednesday in New York.

Getty ImagesA view from the Hudson River of lower Manhattan's financial district, including the World Trade Center Twin Towers.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/america-pauses-for-moment-of-reflection-to-mark-13th-anniversary-of-the-911-attacks/feed0galleryMembers of the New York Police Department, Fire Department of New York and Port Authority Police Department carry a U.S. flag at the beginning of the memorial observances held at the site of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2014.AP Photo/Jason DeCrowAP Photo/Carol OrazemCHANG W. LEE/AFP/Getty ImagesJIM WATSON/AFP/Getty ImagesAP Photo/Charles DharapakChang W. Lee - Pool/Getty ImagesAP Photo/Andrew BurtonJustin Lane- Pool/Getty ImagesAP Photo/Mark LennihanGetty ImagesJonathan Kay: Thirteen years after 9/11, the debate about Islam is still dominated, on both sides, by hysteriahttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jonathan-kay-thirteen-years-after-911-the-debate-about-islam-is-still-dominated-on-both-sides-by-hysteria
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“Islam isn’t necessarily a violent faith, and it is not markedly more acceptable to the Muslims of the world than, say, to the town of Collingwood, Ont., that innocents be massacred, foreigners beheaded, or women flogged for wearing a mini-dress, driving a car, or even seeking to be educated,” Conrad Black writes elsewhere on this site. “Islamic discontent, like most revolutions, has become gradually more extreme, but terror is ultimately intolerable and Thermidor always comes.”

That seems sensible enough, especially to Canadian ears: This coming Thursday will make the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. During this period, our country has witnessed not a single act of Islamist terrorism (although several amateurish plots have been disrupted). If it really were true that the Islamic faith was nothing but an irredeemable death cult (which is the theme of a disturbingly large number of letters to the editor we receive at this newspaper), one would think that Muslims wold be able to achieve a higher post-9/11 Canadian infidel death toll than zero.

The facts suggest that our brand of multiculturalism works a lot better than the kind they practice in Britain, France and Scandinavia, where many Muslims live in radicalized ghettoes. Yes, Canada has a few Wahabbi mosques. But on balance, the numbers on educational attainment, earnings, employment status, citizenship attainment, military enlistment, language skills, and marriage practices show that Canadians Muslims are better integrated into mainstream life than Muslims in any other Western nation.

But you wouldn’t know all that from reading the somewhat hysterical responses — from both sides of the culture-war barricades — that greet many of the articles I have written or published on the subject of Islam. Last week was a particularly exciting one for me: I was accused of being both an Islamophobe and an Islamist quisling, by different people, on the same day.

On August 29, I published a column by Afsun Qureshi, a woman born into a Canadian Muslim family who now lives in London, England. She provided a nuanced (that word alone will get me hate mail) meditation on the shahadah, an Islamic prayer testifying to belief in the identity of Allah as the one true God. That prayer, Qureshi noted, was uttered by her dying uncle in a Toronto hospital room many years ago, as she watched as a confused child — but also by terrified Kenyan shoppers during the 2013 Westgate Mall terrorist attacks, presenting their attackers with proof that they were true Muslims. Ms. Qureshi mused as to whether the rest of us should learn the prayer — and other elements of Islam — as a form of intellectual self-defence against Islamist fanatics. It was an interesting point to make, and I was happy to publish it, especially because I get so few contributions from Muslim authors.

Related

But enraged right-wing bloggers — even intelligent ones — blew a gasket. One prominent writer even declared that Ms. Qureshi was endorsing “universal prostration before Islam,” a view that the blogger’s fans parroted on their own blogs (it’s unclear how many actually read Qureshi’s article) until I began receiving complaints in my own inbox about my apparently horrifying Islamist tendencies. (Some of the more sensible letters can be found on our web site.)

Ironically, that same week, I was accused of the exact opposite sin, after I wrote an article about slaughtered journalist James Foley and the sick culture of martyrdom that animated his executioners. I pointed out that Europe once had a culture of military martyrdom, as well, but it was extinguished in the senseless slaughter of the First World War, which began 100 years ago this summer.

The problem is that 13 years after 9/11, we still can’t seem to manage to have an adult conversation about Islam

In a published response, Azeezah Kanji and Samira Kanji argued that my “dehumanizing rhetoric” was playing into “the popular portrayal of Arabs and Muslims as death-fetishizing hordes — backwards, belligerent, barbaric.” But in fact, I’d argue that my article aimed at the opposite conclusion, which is this: There is no essential difference between Europeans and Arabs, except the difference that is programmed into them by their history, including the history of warfare. Just as the First World War destroyed many of the West’s romantic myths about war’s glories, so might the war of all-against-all currently unfolding in Syria and Iraq deal a fatal blow to the culture of murderous religious fanaticism that lies behind ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah and a dozen other Islamist groups running riot through this part of the world. Such an observation may be politically incorrect. But I don’t think it’s “dehumanizing.”

The larger problem here is that, 13 years after 9/11, we still can’t seem to manage to have an adult conversation about Islam. Express any sort of compassion or nuance about the faith, and you’re accused of universal prostration before the Mohammedan hordes. Speak up about the religious and cultural traditions that cause someone to cut a journalist’s head off, and you’re an Islamophobe. Sometimes, it feels like the conversation hasn’t progressed much since the Twin Towers were still standing.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jonathan-kay-thirteen-years-after-911-the-debate-about-islam-is-still-dominated-on-both-sides-by-hysteria/feed0stdPhilip Marchand: Extreme Reads from 2014‘I could have killed him': Bill Clinton had chance to take out Osama bin Laden and didn’t do it, new tape revealshttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/i-could-have-killed-him-bill-clinton-had-chance-to-take-out-bin-laden-and-didnt-take-it-new-tape-reveals
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At a 2001 business luncheon in Australia, hours before the 9/11 attacks, former U.S. President Bill Clinton spoke of his decision not to kill Osama bin Laden, according to an Australian businessman who released a 13-year-old tape recording this week.

“He’s a very smart guy. I spent a lot of time thinking about him,” Clinton is heard saying of bin Laden, the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks that took down the World Trade Centre towers in New York City.

Related

“I nearly got him,” he says, eliciting laughs from the crowd. “I could have killed him, but I would have had to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children. And then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.”

Skynet NewsMichael Kroger, a former president of a regional wing of the Australian Liberal Party who was at the 2001 Clinton speech and released a tape Wednesday.

Australian businessman and former political operative Michael Kroger told Skynet News Wednesday that he recently “remembered” he had the tape from the Sept. 10, 2001 speech, which he said was recorded with Mr. Clinton’s knowledge.

“I thought it would be worth your audience hearing what Bill Clinton said just a few hours before the planes hit the World Trade Centre.”

Clinton representatives did not immediately respond to a request to confirm the veracity of the recording. But the 9/11 Commission Report details Mr. Clinton’s attempts to “get bin Laden” during his time in office.

In accordance with The New York Times licensing agreement, this article has been removed. You can still view it at nytimes.com.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/the-rise-of-al-qaeda/feed2stdSheikh Mostafa Elazabawy, second from left, the imam of Masjid Manhattan, at his mosque in New York.Jonathan Kay: 9/11 truther Richard Gage is a preacher to a dying breedhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jonathan-kay-911-truther-richard-gage-is-a-preacher-to-a-dying-breed
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Ask Richard Gage how he came to become obsessed with what he calls the “truth” about 9/11, and you hear what sounds an awful lot like a story of religious conversion.

It was March 2006, and the mild-mannered California architect was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway on his way to a construction meeting. Bored, he flipped on KPFA 94.1 FM, a listener-supported “free-speech” station out of Berkeley — “to hear what the communists were talking about,” as he later told me in a 2009 interview.

Up to that point in his life, Gage had been a staunch “Ronald Reagan Republican” (his words) and an Iraq War supporter. But what he heard on KPFA’s airwaves blew his mind.

“[The speaker] was talking about the 118 [World Trade Center] first-responders — information that had just come out in 2005 — who said they’d heard explosions and flashes of light, beams dripping with molten metal, all amid the collapse of 80,000 tons of structural steel,” he told me. “It hit me like a two-by-four. How come I’d never heard of any of this? I was shocked. I had to pull my car to the side of the road to absorb it all. I knew I’d be late for the meeting. But I didn’t care.”

Shortly thereafter, Richard Gage quit his job and moved out of his family home. His non-Truther friends thought he was acting weird, but it didn’t bother him: Gage now had a new life, traveling around the world as a sort of itinerant 9/11 Truther Extraordinaire, telling audiences large and small that we need a “new investigation” into the Sept. 11 attacks.

Gage’s stock presentation goes on for hours, and features hundreds of detailed PowerPoint slides. All point toward the same conspiratorial-minded conclusion: The WTC towers were brought down by “internal demolition” — an inside job, in other words. I’ve personally sat through that same presentation three times — in New York, Toronto and Montreal (as well as the above-referenced interview I did with him for my 2011 book on conspiracy theories, Among the Truthers.)

The 9/11 “Truth” movement has hatched plenty of stars, of course — including hysterical radio host and internet sensation Alex Jones. But thanks to his professional training as an architect, Gage has always stood out as pre-eminent. Jones and other hotheads supplied the late-night AM Radio call-in-show rhetoric about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney engineering 9/11 as a pretext to steal the world’s oil supply on orders from the Illuminati and the Rothschilds or what not. But Gage was the guy with the pocket protector who operated the conspiracists’ back office — the researcher who ticked off the Truther talking points about the melting point of steel and the structural integrity of modern skyscrapers.

This month, Gage is back in Canada as part of an 18-city “ReThink911” tour, delivering an updated version of that same stock presentation. (The tour coincides with a paid video-ad campaign in Toronto’s subway system, featuring footage of the collapse of WTC building 7, a favourite subject for all 9/11 Truthers.) Thursday night brought him to the University of Toronto’s Innis College, and he was in fine form.

Gage’s audience was the usual mix of graying hippies, student radicals and unclassifiable oddballs. One man declared that’s he’d come because he wanted to hear a “scientist” talk about 9/11 instead of “conspiracy theorists.” A female audience member, when asked by a National Post reporter what she thought happened on 9/11, declared “I just think they’re warmongers,” and compared 9/11 to the Gulf of Tonkin. A man wearing a fedora and mismatched clothes told the same reporter he’d spent “5,000 to 6,000” hours investigating 9/11, and that the FBI had followed him and his friend while they were in the United States. (His two friends declined the opportunity to be interviewed, on the claim that the National Post is funded by “the CIA.” If only.)

All of these people seemed extremely impressed with Gage. When he’d finished his presentation, Gage asked audience members to put up their hand if they now believed that the World Trade Center was destroyed through “controlled demolition” instead of crashed airplanes. It was hard to spot anyone who didn’t have their arm raised.

Then they gave him a standing ovation.

***

When you experience Gage’s slideshow (which I must admit, is quite mesmerizing) and observe the audience’s rapturous reaction, it is easy to imagine that he is proselytizing some vigorous new creed. It’s easy to forget that, in fact, 9/11 Trutherism has been on the decline for years now.

Conspiracism in general isn’t going anywhere, of course. But based on my own (admittedly unscientific) ongoing study of conspiracist web sites and chat forums, 9/11 Trutherism in particular has been on the downswing since George W. Bush left office. In left-wing conspiracist circles, it has been replaced by a mish-mash of phobias surrounding Wi-Fi, GMOs and other modern technologies. On the right, it’s been replaced by Obama Birtherism, and bizarre theories about how Sandy Hook and the Boston Marathon attack were “false flag” operations hatched by gun-control fanatics. Alex Jones (who once claimed he’d predicted 9/11) rarely talks about the 9/11 attacks anymore. Compared to everybody else, Gage has become something of a one-issue dinosaur.

What put the 9/11 Truth movement into its tailspin? For the scientifically minded, the fateful day came in November, 2008, when the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) delivered its definitive report on the collapse of WTC 7 — to complement the equally definitive reports NIST delivered on the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2005. Needless to say, the investigators found no trace of internal demolition.

But the larger factor likely was something completely unrelated to 9/11: the election of Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. Even the most hard-boiled Truther had difficulty explaining why a newly elected left-wing Democratic president was not using his considerable executive powers to unearth the mass murder perpetrated by his Republic predecessor. Once revealed, Bush’s complicity in 9/11 surely would have utterly destroyed the GOP brand for a generation — perhaps forever.

And, indeed, some 9/11 Truthers did try to go double or nothing, arguing that Obama and Bush answered to the same dark master. When I interviewed Alex Jones, for instance, he tried to convince me that there is no real difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to the larger plot to enslave Americans: “They answer to the same people. The president is nothing more than a pitch man — a Madison Avenue front.” But the idea of Obama and Bush being in league together is so weird that it has stretched the credulity of even the most committed conspiracy theorists.

What made 9/11 conspiracy theories attractive, for a time, was that Dick Cheney was easily vilified into a protagonist’s role in an imaginary 9/11 plot. Even many of those who approve of the Iraq War and Cheney’s other self-declared master-strokes must concede that there was something vaguely sinister-seeming about his role in the Bush White House — especially when it came to his ties to the oil industry, and the (litigated) battle he waged to keep his meetings with oil execs hidden. As for Bush himself, most 9/11 conspiracy theories present him as a sort of perfect dupe, whose presidency was exploited by Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the other ruthless vulcans in his midst. It all made for great pulp fiction.

Obama never fit that cackling Monty Burns mould: The idea of him scheming to enslave the world and siphon off its oil never fit his more subdued, academic personality. In fact, when you study the conspiracy theories that anti-Obama militants have concocted over the last six years, it’s interesting to note that they all involve passive sins of omission. Obama, it is alleged, is letting jihadis impose “stealth shariah” on the United States. Obama is allegedly abandoning Israel so that the Jewish State would be destroyed by the Iranians. Obama allegedly permitted the United States to fall into economic crisis so that he might have an excuse to impose socialist stimulus policies and (according to the most fevered sources) completely destroy global capitalism.

Flying planes into the World Trade Center and then blowing up the buildings with hidden bombs would be very evil. But it also would be very bold. It would require an alpha male, in other words. (All conspiracy theories revolve around men — the community is quite sexist that way.) Obama, for all his shariah-loving, Islamist, Kenyan-born, communist, Israel-hating bona fides, is more in the beta category — which is why the rise of the Birthers inevitably brought about the descent of the Truthers.

But don’t tell Richard Gage. His next appearance is Sunday in London, Ont. Last I checked, tickets were still available.

NEW YORK — Jurors at the Manhattan trial of Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law watched video of Al-Qaeda’s leaders threaten America before and after the Sept. 11 attacks as the government launched its case against the terror group’s one-time spokesman, a presentation dismissed by a defence lawyer as movie-like theatrics.

Prosecutors made heavy use Wednesday of the monitors in front of nine women and three men serving as jurors in the trial of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the highest-ranking Al-Qaeda figure to face trial on U.S. soil since suicide attackers struck the city’s twin towers more than a dozen years ago.

They showed video clips of bin Laden in the 1990s urging the deaths of Americans anywhere they were found and displayed pictures of Abu Ghaith, an assault rifle by his side, sitting with bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders in the days and months after the attacks.

The trial’s first witness, FBI Agent James Fitzgerald, who travelled the world investigating Al-Qaeda before and after 9-11, enabled the government to tell how bin Laden used his terror network in the late 1990s to carry out several major attacks on Americans.

Those attacks included the August 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people, including a dozen Americans, and the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Aden harbour in Yemen that killed 17 American sailors.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Ferrara asked Fitzgerald whether the FBI’s investigation into 9-11 had turned up any evidence that Abu Ghaith was involved.

In opening statements, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Lewin said bin Laden summoned Abu Ghaith on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, and asked him to use his oratory skills as the public face of Al-Qaeda to recruit and inspire recruits to attack the United States again.

“Literally moments after the attacks of Sept. 11, Osama Bin Laden turned to this man,” Lewin said, walking over to point at Abu Ghaith. “Osama bin Laden asked that man to deliver Al-Qaeda’s murderous decree to the entire world.

“He needed the world to know that his organization was responsible and to rally his troops. He turned to a man he already trusted. He asked the defendant to help Al-Qaeda go a step further by inciting others to fight and kill.

Abu Ghaith, 48, a onetime imam at a Kuwaiti mosque, was brought to New York from Turkey last year. He has pleaded not guilty to charges he conspired to kill Americans after the Sept. 11 attacks and provided material support and resources to Al-Qaeda. Born in Kuwait, he is married to bin Laden’s eldest daughter, Fatima. According to Cohen, they were married in 2008 or 2009.

Prosecutors allege Abu Ghaith began his rise through the ranks for Al-Qaeda by becoming a motivational speaker at safe houses and training camps for aspiring jihadists in the weeks and months before Sept. 11. Afterward, bin Laden instructed him to lead recruitment efforts by appearing in widely distributed videos.

“For more than a year after, the defendant used the murderous power of his words to try to strengthen Al-Qaeda,” Lewin said.

He quoted the defendant several times, including one remark he said came weeks after the attack: “These young men who have destroyed the United States and launched the storm of airplanes against it have done a good deed. The storm of airplanes will not abate.”

The government contends the statements are evidence that Abu Ghaith had prior knowledge of the failed shoe-bomb airline attack by Richard Reid in December 2001 and another plot to down a flight from Paris to Miami with explosives hidden in shoes. Prosecutors are expected to introduce testimony via video feed of another former Al-Qaeda member in Great Britain who was in on the shoe-bomb plot.

Cohen told jurors they might feel outrage over some of the “dumb” and “stupid” statements made by his client. But he urged them to keep open minds.

“At the end of the day, there’s really no evidence,” Cohen said. “There is the substitution for evidence with fright and alarm.”

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: China’s response to the deaths of more than 30 people in Kunming provides a revealing glimpse into Beijing’s mindset.

State news media dubbed the attack “China’s 9/11″ and rounded on the U.S. embassy in Beijing and Western news outlets for their callousness in responding to the incident.

This seems to be something of an overreaction.

To recap, 9/11 involved a far-flung and ambitious Al-Qaeda plot that led the hijacking of four airliners, the immolation of the World Trade Centre in New York, and the deaths of almost 3,000 people.

In contrast, the Kunming incident was the work of Uighurs from the far western province of Xinjiang — if Chinese officials are to be believed. Armed with knives, they killed between 29 and 34 people at the train station in Kunming.

And yes, it was shocking, but so were the deaths of last week of more than 50 Nigerian students burned and hacked to death by Boko Haram terrorists; or Muslim Rohingya murdered by Buddhist mobs in Burma. Chinese media didn’t waste much time on their horrible fates.

It’s all about control. What has really shaken Beijing is its inability to prevent the attack, despite the huge apparatus of state security. Just like Falun Gong before them, a few Uighur activists succeeded in tweaking the tiger’s tail.

An editorial in the People’s Daily condemns the western media’s hypocrisy, which it clearly links to suggestions Uighurs might have reasons for their discontent.

This was an act of terrorism directed against the whole of humanity, civilization and society …

Faced with such tragedy and such unambiguous facts, it is a hard-hearted and cynical media that would engage in such hypocrisy. Don’t they love to talk about “human rights”? Did they not see the pictures of innocent victims lying in pools of their own blood? Did they show even the slightest concern for the victims and their “human rights”? Should such an event occur in America, how would they respond to the incident? Would they be quite so coy about describing the murderers as “terrorists”?

Xinhua quoted navy rear-admiral Yin Zhuo as saying: “The well-planned attack was not an issue of [ethnicity] or religion, it was an issue of terrorism with links to terrorist forces out of the country” …

Said James Leibold, senior lecturer in politics and Asian studies at La Trobe University, “The default position of the government has always been to blame foreigners and never admit that ethnic relations in China might have serious problems.”

No details, other than that broad claim, have been released. But if true, the attack would represent a dramatic escalation of China’s simmering Uighur problem … China’s harsh security crackdown has made it next to impossible for international journalists to report from Xinjiang and to assess the real strength of radical Islamist and separatist sentiment on the ground.

The consensus, at least up until now, has been that it is probably exaggerated by the Chinese government in order to justify the restrictions it places on Uighur religion, language and culture.

Coincidentally, or not, the Kunming attack follows the arrest of Chinese scholar Ilham Tohti, one of the few people brave enough to criticize Chinese policies in Xinjiang. He’s been accused of fomenting separatism — a.k.a., splittism, chief of the alleged crimes of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader — reports The New York Times’Andrew Jacobs.

An economics professor in Beijing, Mr. Tohti, 44, was an outspoken but careful critic of Chinese policies in Xinjiang, an energy-rich region that adjoins several Central Asian nations and is something of a geopolitical minefield. Tensions between Uighurs and the Chinese security forces have turned increasingly violent, with almost weekly clashes that in recent months have taken more than 100 lives …

Under Chinese law, even highlighting ethnic problems in places like Xinjiang and Tibet can be seen as threatening national unity because the state refuses to acknowledge that such frictions exist.

National Post reader Raymond Heard suggested last week’s question: “Do you remember where you were (when Kennedy was shot, when Apollo 11 landed, when the Twin Towers fall, etc.)? As you can read below, our letter writers have vivid memories of these events, and more

That day in Dallas

On Nov. 22, 1963, I was on the rewrite desk of the Montreal Star. We were holding page one for news from Dallas while watching a teary-eyed Walter Cronkite of CBS report the unthinkable. Our Washington correspondent called to dictate a piece, saying a right-wing terrorist had killed JFK. In fact the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had communist connections. Our man in Washington soon left the Star and I replaced him, covering Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and then serving as managing editor until an 11-month printers’ strike killed the paper in 1979. The ill wind from Dallas blew me some good 50 years ago.

Raymond Heard, Toronto.

I was an exchange teacher in Houston and had met president Kennedy in the White House when he welcomed the British teachers. An announcement came over the PA system in my Grade 12 mathematics classroom” “the president had been shot!” We sat in stunned silence, then we were told he was dead. On leaving the room a boy said to me, “Now you see what we do to people we don’t like.”

John J. Jackson, Victoria.

My family was living in Manhattan and I was taking a stroll with my youngest son in his carriage. All of a sudden there was panic in the streets and everybody was talking about what had just happened — it was unbelievable! I immediately went home and my entire family was glued to the TV in disbelief. We cried as if in mourning the entire weekend.

Dorothy Klein, Toronto.

I was a Grade 8 student at Peter Secord Public School in Scarborough, Ont. On that day a teacher burst through our classroom door, with a television on a trolley (a TV in the classroom was unheard of then). The entire class sat in stunned silence as heard the news about JFK’s death.

Janet Wickett, Toronto.

The 1963 assassination of John Kennedy is seared in my memory. Sitting in a classroom, hearing that the macho president had been shot was scary enough, but returning to school after lunch to the message that the president had died was a devastating event for a 13-year-old. I was sent home to find my mother crying in front of the TV.

Clifford Jacques, Greenfield Park, Que.

I just walked in to my Grade 10 Latin class when a friend came running in and said, “Did you hear that the president has been shot?” Thinking it was a joke, I waited for the punch line. Looking back, this event, plus the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, was the coming of my political age. As a 16-year-old, I wondered if this was the beginning of the end.

Jim Sanders. Guelph, Ont.

I was 10 and it was a grey Friday afternoon in November. While I was picking up some groceries for mom, a clerk told me the U.S. president has been shot. I darted home, endured a five-minute Veg-O-Matic commercial and then the CBC feed switched to Walter Cronkite, who confirmed what the clerk had told me.

Steve Flanagan, Ottawa.

I was sharing an office with Tom Alderman, now a CBC reporter. We were writing deathless prose for a multinational oil company. The flow of words ceased forthwith as we mumbled Lord knows what to each other. That night I attended what normally would have been a boisterous dinner party in Toronto, where the wine and conversation flowed copiously. All that was ignored as we grouped around the television as though we had all lost a family member. I will never forget Nov. 22, 1963.

Malcolm Bell, Lions Bay, B.C.

On the afternoon that JFK was shot, I was walking down the hallowed halls of St. John’s Tech in Winnipeg, trying to avoid eye contact with one of the toughs lurking outside of the class from which he was expelled. Suddenly, Brian H., a bit of a goof, accosted me, with: “Okay, Charach, why did you do it!” Then the principal came on the PA system, and the rest is mere prose.

Ron Charach, Toronto.

The day JFK was shot I was Christmas shopping at Eaton’s. I was eight months pregnant with a fifth son. Hearing the news in the toy department, I recall a feeling of shock and needing to sit down. I was unable to continue shopping.

Mary McKim, London, Ont.

The Eagle landed

I remember reading about the Apollo 11 Moon landing, while in an airplane, en route to reform school, when I was a kid. Unforgettable! The Eagle has landed.

Norbert Kaysser, Port Coquitlam, B.C.

Our dad rented a colour TV so we could watch the moon landing and all the footage was broadcast in black and white.

Twitter.com/Mark Yakabuski

My wife and I were in a remote mountain chalet overlooking a beautiful lake. After a refreshing swim, we sat spellbound watching TV, as the Eagle module launched from Apollo 11 and landed softly on the moon’s surface. After 44 years, we still marvel at recalling this momentous event we never imagined we would witness in our lifetime.

Patrick Rosati, Mount Royal, Que.

Some friends and I were huddled around my family’s Grundig short wave radio receiver, in Johannesburg, South Africa. We were awed and enthralled by what we heard, especially as Neil Armstrong uttered his iconic words as he stepped onto the moon surface. Even without the visual benefit of TV, it was a momentous and defining moments; 44 years later, it is still lucid in my memory.

Barry Bloch, Thornhill, Ont.

That goal was scored

In 1972, I was in Grade 6 at Holy Cross School in Toronto. Our teacher, Mrs. Feely, marched us all down to the auditorium where several black and white television sets where high up on stainless steel stands. We sat with legs crossed on the floor, nervous and anxious, rocking back and forth with each emotional turn in play until finally, Paul Henderson scored. We all jumped up, screaming and hugging each other.

Bob Brehl, Toronto.

A significant moment in my life cost me $600. This covered the cost of a round-trip flight to Moscow, 10 nights accommodation in the Intourist Hotel, three meals a day, all sorts of tours, and a ticket to four hockey games at Luzhniki Sports Palace. And in the fourth of those games, on Sept. 28, 1972, Henderson scored the goal. And I was there.

David Gorrell, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.

Darkness on Y2K

On the eve of Y2K, when predictions of power outages were common, I played the prank of the millennium. With one hand on the light switch and one on the TV control, I shut off both as my parents counted down to zero. I could barely contain myself as my mom whispered nervously to my dad (in Chinese), “It’s so accurate.” Unfortunately, my sister gave me away when she noticed that the TV channel light was still on!

James Kang, Toronto.

The day a princess died

On the night of Aug. 31, 1997, I was with my mother in my parents’ bedroom, when all of a sudden a news announcer came on to say that Princess Diana had been in a car accident in Paris France, and that her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed had been killed. The next morning, I heard Diana had died. It was a very sad weekend.

Carolyn A. Barratt, Mississauga, Ont.

On Sept. 3, 1939, I was staying in the quiet English village of Mayfield. The landlady called me in to listen to prime minister Neville Chamberlain on the radio, followed by the national anthem. I went out into the sunny garden, surprised that nothing seemed to have changed. Somehow, I thought a declaration of war meant instant action.

Paul Jones, Ile Perrot, Que.

Crying on 9/11

On 9/11, my daughter called from work, crying. After watching the news on TV, I drove to her work to comfort her and hug her. I remember sitting on a bench that day and weeping for all the families and for the brave firefighters, police officers and civilians who died. I remember how the skies now seemed so silent and eerie. That day, I remember thinking that perhaps I had lost my faith in humanity.

Val Stephanson, Calgary.

On a fabulous fall day I was working outdoors. And then the call came: “Are you near a TV?” I soon was, and I realized that the world around me had changed forever — because this one happened in America. Long believed to be unassailable, impenetrable, the last of the solitudes. All things change. There has always been a Rome. This is the Rome of our day.

Michael Phillippo, Toronto.

9/11 dawned as my 50th birthday. I went to visit the gravesite of my father who had passed away within the year. As I left, CBC Radio reported that a plane had crashed into a building in New York. Although the news made it sound like a small plane, I was instinctively certain it was a terrorist attack. Since that tragic morning, I have never been able to celebrate my birthday.

Moishe (Thomas) Goldstein, Toronto.

I was in Bath, England on 9/11. A couple of days later, we drove through a town where traffic was stopped and people were standing quietly on the sidewalks. I opened the window and a woman put her finger to her lips. All of England was observing two minutes of silence.

Barb Cattanach, Gibsons, B.C.

On the morning of 9/11 we were about to leave a campground in North Dakota. My wife got out at reception then rushed back, yelling: “There is something terrible happening in New York.” “Oh come on, there is always something terrible happening in New York,” I replied. But the look on her face told me that it was more than that. And it was.

George Pearson, L’Ile-Bizard, Que.

I was working as a volunteer in the emergency department at a Toronto hospital. When I passed a group of people watching a TV, I saw the second plane crash into the second Twin Tower. I returned to the emergency room and found the doctors and nurses were preparing for an influx of patients. Then it hit me, Toronto was a big city only an hour’s flying time from New York. And Toronto could be next.

Arthur Rubinoff, Toronto.

We were on our boat in Waterford, N.Y. Went topside and spoke to a ragged, dissolute tramp. He was very effusive in telling me the news. I rushed into the welcome centre and looked at the TV — I was agog. Images of humans flying to their deaths will be with me forever.

Madeleine Wannop Ross Salter, Stoney Creek, Ont.

As I listened to the Howard Stern Radio Show out of New York City, then later watched the news on TV, I felt connected to the confusion and speculation of 9/11. Suddenly I was back in Canada, safe and distant. But for that brief period of time, I felt the fierce patriotism of the American people.

Jeanette McCormack, Oshawa, Ont.

I had just finished rowing in Toronto, and I wondered if I’d seen CN Tower (a rumoured target) for the last time.

Twitter.com/Kris Gross

I was in Grade 8 when the towers fell. I came in from recess and the teacher was trying to watch the video on dial-up.

Twitter.com/Shawn W. Smith

On the morning of 9/11, I was in my car facing east, idly noting the approach of three jets and their cottony contrails. The thought occurred that they resembled exclamation marks, and another voice immediately spoke up. “They look like exclamation marks,” it said, “because they’re emphasizing how important today is.” I scoffed at the thought, assuring myself that it was only another unremarkable Tuesday. I woke up to an entirely new world.

Barry O’Connor, Hamilton, Ont.

I was in Italy driving on the Amalfi Coast with two friends of mine when we heard the news. We stopped for cappuccino, and were told there could be a bomb in the garbage outside the café, so we ran. We cried our way to Amalfi. Bittersweet memories.

Gloria Glover, Toronto.

I remember getting ready for one of my first year classes when I heard the news about 9/11 on the radio. Thought it was a prank.

Twitter.com/Kristina Vyskocil

‏I was walking past the maintenance garage at my work and they had it on TV and I saw the second plane hit.

Twitter.com/Larry newingham

‏I was at work on 9/11, and ran home to watch it on TV. I was too upset to go back to work that day.

Twitter.com/ Jessica Magpie

Despite only being in Grade 1 at the time, I vividly remember how good the weather was that day and glancing at the television and seeing flight 175 fly into the south tower on CNN news. Even though I had no comprehension of the event at the time, that instance is imprinted into my memory along with the expressions on the faces of my parents and teachers that day. I will never forget that morning for the rest of my life.

Felix Burns, Oshawa, Ont.

When the Twin Towers fell, I worked for a publishing company at 70 Yonge Street in Toronto. I had brought my cousin to the city that day, as she wanted to climb the CN Tower. Just after 9:00 a.m., she called me from a phone booth. Downtown emptied within hours and I remember the eerie silence, with a few people staring at underground monitors. On the GO Train home, I grabbed a few extra editions.

Evert Akkerman, Newmarket, Ont.

Multiple memories

I remember where I was when JFK was shot — in jail . My friend “borrowed” his father’s car. Not knowing, the father reported car stolen; police picked us up. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, I was in Fort Lauderdale with my flame, who two years later broke my heart. When the Twin Towers fell I was in class teaching. My first thought was disbelief, then something from the Bible: “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.” I was scared.

Chris Eustace, Montreal.

On Nov. 22, 1963, I was teaching a Grade 5 class at McKee Ave. Public School. We were interrupted by a radio announcement over the PA that JFK had been shot. On Sept. 11, 2001, I was supply teaching at Kingslake Public school . On Feb.1, 2003, I again was supply teaching at Kingslake Public School when we got the tragic news that the NASA shuttle, Columbia, had broken up killing all 7 astronauts.

Peter J. Cober, Toronto.

For Apollo 11’s landing, I was in my parents’ house in London, U.K., watching a B&W TV with a “rabbit-ears” antenna. When Kennedy was shot, I was in a student residence at Imperial College, U.K., discussing a lab report over a beer with a fellow post-grad student. For 9/11, I was in my Toronto office, when a colleague said: “A plane has hit the World Trade Center.” I responded, “What, a light aircraft?” I’m still horrified by my mistaken assumption.

Roger Jones, Thornhill, Ont.

FK was shot? I was nine years old and had gone home for lunch. My older brother and I had a habit of watching “The Gayle Storm Show” during the lunch hour when we lived in Edmonton. The program was interrupted to bring a special news bulletin advising that the President had been shot. My brother immediately ran upstairs to tell my mother this distressing news. My beloved brother, Dr. Richard A. Crowe, PhD, professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Hilo-Hawaii, and accomplished musician, who was a great influence in my life, was tragically killed on May 27th, 2012. I included this story in my tribute to him during his memorial celebration on June 24, 2012. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon? This was a “famjam” experience, where, now living in Oakville, our family sat together to watch this event in our rec room (still on a black and white TV). My older brother Richard, who was 17 at the time, was an astronomy-enthusiast and encouraged all of us in his interests. When the Twin Towers Fell? I worked for an insurance company in Waterloo and had gone to work that day as usual. My 13 year old son had stayed home from school that day so I called him around sometime between 9:15 a.m. to see how he was doing. He said he was watching TV when suddenly the program was interrupted to bring a special news bulletin advising that one of the towers at the World Trade Centre had been struck by a plane and was on fire. The report sounded so unbelievable that I couldn’t be sure that he had the facts correct. Unfortunately, I was soon to learn that it was true and by then, the first tower had collapsed.

Carolyn (Crowe) Ibele, Waterloo, Ont.

Other memories

Two war-events remain vividly alive in my memory: Germany’s attack of Holland on May 10, and the bombing of Rotterdam on May 15, 1940.

1. I was living with my parents and younger sister on Franselaan 226B in Rotterdam. A large piece of land, between our street and the rail line Rotterdam-Schiedam was used by many of the citizens for small garden plots often with a little shack for tools, etc. The afternoon of the second war-day German parachutists were dropped here and started a gun battle with the Dutch Mariners who were on our street; we had the bullet holes in our front window. It lasted two days with many casualties on either side.

2. The heart of the city was bombed out by German Dornier’s, most likely using fire-bombs because we could see the flames from where we lived. Many of the unhurt we saw much later coming down our street (from Marconi plein), crying for help, for pain of lost ones, etc. As a nine-year-boy, you don’t remember details, but you don’t forget the bullets and the devastation.

Peter Koning, Burlington, Ont.

I had just finished my run, it was a gorgeous late summer morning with nary a cloud in the sky. My daughters, who were supposed to be at school, were glued to the tube. “Dad, they just flew two planes into the World Trade Center,” my oldest said. I watched in awe. Being a cop, within 20 minutes I was called into work to help with security at the airport.

Steve Flanagan, Ottawa.

I remember where I was when JFK was shot. I was laying on my couch in my house watching TV on daystar.com and I watched the whole scene. The shooting and the car speeding way with Jackie laying on JFK. My phone rang and I told the caller from Montreal that JFK had been killed. The twin towers: I had just opened the office door to the Cateraqui Cemetery office. I saw the two men there sitting speechless watching TV. I looked at the screen just as the second plane was plunging into the second tower. We were all in shock.

Margaret Hay, Kingston, Ont.

I was home alone watching CNN when the second plane crashed into the Twin Towers and it became instantly obvious that it was a terrorist attack. Upon learning that Islamic terrorists were responsible I felt intense anger and disgust, not just towards the mystical savages directly responsible but mostly towards those who made these otherwise impotent creatures potent–the states that sponsor terrorism (Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.), especially those in the West that appease such states.

Glenn Woiceshyn, Calgary.

I grew up in King, Ont., and was 13/14, we were assembled in the school halls where the announcement was made; JFK was larger-then-life. My sister and I watched Neil Armstrong’s first “moon” step on a T.V. through electronics shop window in Paris, France, totally awesome! I was listening to the car radio while running errands in Orangeville, Ont., when I heard about the potential of 3.000 souls, gone in an instant; it’s hard to fathom such hatred.

Heather O’Neill

President Kennedy was dead, the radio said so. I was 7 and I was alone at home. I always cry when I think about it. Apollo 11 landed and I was at camp. We got to stay up late the next evening for the moon walk. A scratchy image on a small TV. The world was black and white then. 911? Going to park with my dog; radio told me a small plane had crashed into The World Trade Center. No big deal I thought.

Aida Batten

On Nov. 22, 1963, I was working at the TD Bank, Maple Ridge (Haney ), B.C. At about 10:30 a.m., a customer told us that JFK had been shot in Dallas. At about 1:15 pm in Maple Ridge, the Vancouver Sun newspaper had a special edition in coin boxes detailing what was known at press time. I remember that the weather was mild and dry and this continued for at least five days.

David A. Sinclair, Vancouver.

On that fateful day I was sitting with others in a large gym writing an exam at London teacher’s College. Once completed, the principal entered the gym and gave us the horrific news. There was mostly stunned shock and some cries of “no!” A group of us went to a friend’s home to watch unfolding events on TV. Over the next days I sat stunned in front of the television and continued to mourn long after the official ceremonies were over.

Edite Lynch, Barrie, Ont.

I was a teenager in Dublin, Ireland, when I picked up the Saturday morning newspaper and read about the assassination of JFK. I immediately burst into my parent’s bedroom and told them the horrible news. I was visiting my sister in Toronto and on the day of the moon landing a friend and I toured Niagara Falls. On the way back we went to Nathan Philip Square and watched the landing on the big screen with thousands of others. On the morning of the attack on the WTC, I was in my office in Mississauga when my secretary burst in and said that the WTC was on fire. I went to the office of the CEO who had just turned on the television and were joined by the rest of the staff as we sat dumbfounded and mesmerized by what we saw. The entire day passed as a complete haze.

Etan Sazle, Toronto.

Green Dolphin restaurant, Queen & Lansdowne in TO. Skipping classes and heard on radio about JFK.

Twitter.com/Wayne Brown

Being of a certain age, I remember both Walther Cronkite’s announcement and feeling a bit put out by the fact that President Kennedy’s funeral coverage pre-empted Roy Rogers. I got to watch Apollo 11 on my Uncle’s colour TV, but pre-cable snowy images are pretty much the same in colour or black and white. At the time of the twin towers collapse, I was en-route to Hamilton. Funny, that even after all those years, those particular memories remain fresh.

Rob Sciuk, Oshawa, Ont.

I remember where I was when JFK was shot. I was 17yrs old and returning from my first week of practice teaching a grade 5/6 class in Windsor ON. The classroom teacher came to me in the middle of my lesson to tell my JFK had been assassinated. She told me “things like this happen” when teaching and that I must continue and not alarm the class. Living in a border city we were very Americanized — JFK felt as if he was OUR president.. I will never forget the 3 bus journey home—not a word was spoken. There were tears in everyone’s eyes with some sobbing openly. The bus drove down Ouellette St, in Windsor passing the Windsor-Detroit tunnel. Commuters emotionally distraught, not believing the devastating news that by now had spread throughout the world. Life would never be the same.

C. Kelly

As a recent arrival to USA with my family from Canada in summer 1963, I was a six year old living in Pasadena California. We were on our way back to the GTA for the funeral of my grandfather- driving through Nevada or Utah at the time of the assassination of JFK. I recall my parents being upset- and that we had extreme trouble finding restaurants and grocery stores open on our way to Canada, as essentially USA “rolled up their sidewalks ” in the immediate days after JFK assassination, while the country mourned.

HandoutKen Basnicki, Maureen Basnicki's late husband, who died when the first hijacked plane rammed the North Tower on 9/11.

Ken Basnicki was meeting colleagues on the 106th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre when al-Qaeda terrorists rammed a hijacked plane into the building on Sept. 11, 2001. Twelve years later, his wife Maureen, a former Air Canada flight attendant and now an outspoken activist for the rights of Canadian terror victims, visited the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay this week to observe court proceedings against accused 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, a.k.a. KSM, and four others, including Ramzi Binalshibh, a would-be hijacker who was refused a U.S. visa and instead allegedly helped coordinate the attacks from Germany. In an interview from Guantanamo, Ms. Basnicki told the National Post’s Stewart Bell what it was like to sit in the same room as those suspected of murdering her husband for their fanatical cause.

Q. What are your impressions of Gitmo?

A. It’s not at all what I expected. It’s a very scenic place. And what a lot of people don’t know is it’s a U.S. naval station that happens to have a prison. It’s not just a prison. It’s like any small town in Canada and the U.S.A., with all the amenities of a small town, including restaurants and a recreational facility.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty ImagesAs of May, 2013, there are 166 detainees at the Guantanamo camp, down from a high of almost 800, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

A. I flew from Washington, D.C., on a chartered flight along with defence and prosecutor teams and media. … They have a special trailer for the families and we have special passes which require an escort but we have less restrictions, shall we say, than regular military personnel.

Q. Why did you want to go?

A. I had an overwhelming desire to see things and judge for myself. I wanted to try to understand why these five men were so full of hate for innocent civilians that they were capable of killing so many people going about their daily life. I wanted to be a representative of another country other than America, because I’m constantly trying to remind both Americans and Canadians that it’s not just all about Americans. There were citizens from 92 countries that lost their lives that day.

FBI handoutRamzi Binalshibh.

Q. What happened in court?A. Much drama. Ramzi was forcibly ejected. It’s because he was not cooperating. I witnessed that all the high-value detainees had nothing but contempt and no respect for the judge. They never stood, as did everybody else, when the judge entered or departed from the court. I noticed right away that the defence were all wearing burkas, the females of course. Not today, because today is Friday and none of the high-value detainees are in court because it’s their prayer day. The detainees are not wearing any type of prison garb. They are easily identified because they’re wearing white, very clean, freshly-pressed, laundered Muslim clothing, all white.

Q. What was it like to finally look them in the face?

A. I did behave like a typical polite Canadian. But I had to control myself. You know, you actually find yourself wanting to make eye contact. It was almost a challenge amongst the family members because they [the detainees] do occasionally look at the family members. And I feel as though — not KSM, but Ramzi — and I made eye contact. And for my part, it was like looking at evil, hate, a monster — straight in the eye. I surprised myself. I just wanted to outstare him, especially as a woman, knowing how they feel about women. It gave me a little sense of satisfaction to be able to look him straight in the eye back. I felt secure. And I could just feel all of the hate and contempt that they could muster. They want to intimidate you and terrorize you, even to this day but I tried not to let that happen. It did not happen.

Q. So you had the sense that when they were looking at the families it wasn’t in an apologetic way?

A. Not at all. Not a hint of remorse or regret. No. Just the opposite. More of a gloating, hateful stare back.

Q. Was there any closure in seeing them in custody and on trial?

A. No, there’s still just a big sense of frustration. Closure, it’s an elusive thing for the families of 9/11. We all want some sense of closure but the families that are here with me, I don’t think any of us have come close to reaching that stage yet.

HandoutMaureen Basnicki meets with the prosecutor of the 9/11 suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

NP GraphicsClick to Enlarge

Q. Is justice being done?

A. Not yet. The prosecution is working very hard to put a process in place but as both sides say, it’s unploughed ground, it’s untested waters. It’s a precedent-setting case and the trial hasn’t even begun. We’re just going through motions right now. And I only see delay tactics on the defence side.

Q. You are there with others who lost their fathers, a brother, a fiancé on 9/11. What was that like?

A. There’s a unique bond that happens immediately, and you’re with people that get it. We share concerns, emotions and 12 years later it’s not so much about the grieving process as it is the quest for justice and accountability, and the determination to have a trial work not just for us but for the rest of the world.

Q. Has your visit helped you deal with the trauma you’ve been through?

A. I was concerned that this would be triggers for the trauma, but the support that I have received far exceeds my anxiety and so it’s been a positive experience for me. I do think it is helping me, mostly because I’m with other families.

Q. And because you won the staring contest.

A. Yeah! Does that sound odd? It’s because I could, in my own small way, look Ramzi — KSM was, he was constantly reading something, so he didn’t do it as often as the others — but to be able to look him in the eyes. And it wasn’t just a glance, it was a hard core stare. That was my moment of triumph.

Peter Redman/National Post FileMaureen Basnicki lost her husband, Ken, in the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11 2001.

One of America’s corporate giants has discovered the hard way that company messages related to the anniversary of the September 11 attacks are probably better left alone — especially when that message goes out on social media.

U.S. communications company AT&T posted a short message and image on its Twitter feed at 9:15 a.m. on Wednesday, the twelfth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The tweet read “Never Forget;” attached was a picture of New York with the “towers of light” where the destroyed World Trade Center used to stand. Inserted over top of the image was a picture of an arm holding a smartphone with the towers of light highlighted on the view screen.

The response to the tweet was immediate and visceral, with many on Twitter calling the move tacky and tasteless, and many more simply coming up with variations of the f-word to throw at the company.

The White House has ordered heightened security at all of its oversea facilities in an attempt to prevent a repeat of last year’s September 11 Benghazi attack. This came as a deadly car bomb hit another location in Libya’s second city.

“The president’s national security team is taking measures to prevent 9/11 related attacks and to ensure the protection of U.S. persons and facilities abroad,” the White House said in a statement, reported Reuters.

One year ago, al-Qaida-linked militants stormed the U.S. mission in Libya’s eastern coastal city of Benghazi and a nearby U.S. building, killing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

The attack sparked a wave of criticism toward President Barack Obama and his administration for its handling of the attack and its aftermath. The administration closed 19 diplomatic posts across the Muslim world for almost a week last month out of caution over a possible al-Qaida strike – likely in response to the Benghazi criticism.

On Aug. 9 of this year, Obama told reporters that the U.S. was still committed to capturing those who carried out the deadly consulate assault. Obama said his government has a sealed indictment naming some suspected of involvement. Officials said earlier that the Justice Department had filed under seal the first criminal charges as part of its investigation of the attack.

The Associated Press reported in May that American officials had identified five men who might be responsible for the attack. The suspects were not named publicly, but the FBI released photos of three of the five suspects, asking the public to provide more information about the men.

AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/GettyImages An armed man waves his rifle as buildings and cars are engulfed in flames after being set on fire inside the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi late on September 11, 2012.

Some in the photographs are thought to be members of Ansar al-Shariah, the Libyan militia group whose fighters were seen near the consulate prior to the violence. Other witnesses reported seeing the leader of an Islamist militia group called Abu Obaida Bin Jarrah, whom U.S. officials told the AP is among the suspects in the sealed indictment. The leader has repeatedly denied being involved and says he abandoned the militia and now works in construction.

Today, a powerful car bomb exploded Wednesday near Libya’s Foreign Ministry building in the heart of tBenghazi, security officials said, exactly one year after an attack there killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

The early morning blast targeted a building that once housed the U.S. Consulate under the rule of King Idris, who former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi overthrew in a 1969 bloodless coup. The explosion caused no serious casualties, though several passers-by were slightly wounded, officials said.

The bomb blew out a side wall of the building, leaving desks, filing cabinets and computers strewn among the concrete rubble. It also damaged the Benghazi branch of the Libyan Central Bank along a major thoroughfare in the city.

Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty ImagesU.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a ceremony in observance of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel listens at the Pentagon September 11, 2013 in Arlington, Virginia.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which also comes on the 12th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the U.S. The security officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to journalists.

Gadhafi was killed after eight-month uprising that descended into a civil war in 2011. Since then, successive Libyan interim governments have failed to impose law and order. The country remains held hostage by unruly militia forces initially formed to fight Gadhafi. The militias, which have huge stockpiles of sophisticated weaponry, now threaten Libya’s nascent democracy.

Car bombs and drive-by shootings since the end the civil war routinely kill security officials in Benghazi, the birthplace of the uprising.

Tawfiq Breik, a lawmaker with the liberal-leaning National Forces Alliance, said that the attacks will continue as long as Libya lacks a strong national army and police.

“Even with so many officials assassinated, no one held accountable,” Breik said. “No one arrested. The state is disabled.”

In the United States, officials took a few moments to commemorate the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

As bells tolled solemnly, Americans marked the 12th anniversary the attacks with the reading of the names, moments of silence and serene music that have become tradition.

JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty ImagesObama pays his respect after placing a wreath at the Pentagon Memorial to mark the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, on September 11, 2013.

At a morning ceremony on the 2-year-old memorial plaza at the site of the World Trade Center, relatives recited the names of the nearly 3,000 people who died when hijacked jets crashed into the twin towers and the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pa., as well as the 1993 trade center bombing victims’ names.

In Washington, President Barak Obama, joined by first lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and wife Jill Biden, and members of the White House staff, walked out to the South Lawn at 8:46 a.m. – the moment the first plane struck the south tower in New York. Another jetliner struck the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m.

“It is an honor to be with you here again to remember the tragedy of 12 Septembers ago, to honor the greatness of all who responded and to stand with those who still grieve and to provide them some measure of comfort once more,” Obama said. “Together we pause and we give humble thanks as families and as a nation.”

A moment of silence was also held at the U.S. Capitol.

At the site in lower Manhattan, friends and families silently held up photos of the deceased. Others wept.

Allan Tannenbaum-Pool/Getty ImagesPort Authority Police Department snipers provide security at the 9/11 Memorial during ceremonies for the 12th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on lower Manhattan at the World Trade Center site on September 11, 2013 in New York City.

“Twelve years is like 15 minutes,” said Clyde Frazier, whose son Clyde died in the attack and whose remains were never found. “Time stands still because you love your child, you love your son. … Nothing changes except he’s not here. It takes a toll on your body. You still look like you, but inside, you’re a real wreck.”

Bells tolled to mark the second plane hitting the second tower and the moments when the towers fell. Near the memorial plaza, police barricades were blocking access to the site, even as life around the World Trade Center looked like any other morning, with workers rushing to their jobs and construction cranes looming over the area.

“As time passes and our family grows, our children remind us of you,” Angilic Casalduc said of her mother, Vivian Casalduc. “We miss you.”

Twelve years ago today was one of those breathtakingly beautiful early autumn days, literally without a cloud in the sky. A huge high-pressure system, extending from west of the Great Lakes to the eastern seaboard, put a vast area of the Earth’s most expensive real estate, with its futuristic cities, old-fashioned towns, pristine forests, cultivated fields, picturesque lakes, historic rivers, gentle hills, and brutal highways under a dome of blue.

My flying partner at the time, David Frid, was at the controls of our single-engine four-seater when a voice came through his communication radio from ATC (Air Traffic Control). It said that Canada’s airspace was closed, and all aircraft should land at the nearest suitable airport.

Dave, a senior captain with a major airline, had never heard such an ATC transmission before. It flashed through his mind that it might be a nuclear attack. Being about 20 miles west of CYQA (Muskoka airport), he headed for it. A few minutes later, he and his passenger were safely on the ground. The time was around 9:40 a.m.

CYQA is just two runways, a gas pump and a machine that dispenses soft drinks. There was no one who had any information. Dave phoned me. I had no real information at that point myself, of course, but I had seen the second jetliner fly into the second tower on television with my own eyes. That happened about 45 minutes before the authorities ordered air space closed for all traffic on civilian frequencies, with expectation that the only non-military aircraft left flying would be terrorist-controlled.

That’s pretty much what happened. As my partner and I were talking on the phone, the fire ignited by a third hijacked airliner, AA Flight 77, which slammed into the Pentagon just as the air space was being closed, was causing a section to collapse. By the time we put down the phone 12 years ago, we were living in a different world from the one in which we went to sleep the night before.

We didn’t know what happened – yet we did know. It was evident that the attack was suicidal terrorism, and therefore its source was almost certainly militant Islam.

The soldiers of the Rising Sun didn’t bring box-cutters or shoe-bombs to the battlefield. Yet in less than five years, they were history

Within a week, as details became known or confirmed, the standard historic comparison most commentators chose was with Pearl Harbor. The sneak attack of the Japanese militarists on America resembled the sneak attack of the militant Islamists’ – except the latter was more audacious and effective.

The big difference is that Pearl Harbor occurred in December, 1941, and the score was settled with interest in August, 1945. The score was settled in four and a half years against an enemy that had planes and battleships as well as a warrior culture and kamikaze determination. The soldiers of the Rising Sun didn’t bring box-cutters or shoe-bombs to the battlefield. Yet in less than five years, they were history.

Here we are, 12 years after 9/11, with nothing settled. True, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are some of his henchmen. It has little more significance than if they had died in traffic accidents. Their deaths are a credit to the Navy Seals’ training or the drone-maker’s art, but little else.

I think the difference between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor lies in a remark made by a Japanese Admiral, Isoroku Yamamoto, who said after Pearl Harbor: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” In contrast, I fear 9/11 may have made a sleepy giant resolutely pull the covers over his head and go right back to sleep.

No sweet dream, I fear. Sleeping though history is a recipe for a nightmare.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/george-jonas-pearl-harbor-with-box-cutters/feed0stdtrade_centres.jpg'I felt nothing for them': Canadian faces the men accused of killing his brother on 9/11http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/i-felt-nothing-for-them-canadian-faces-the-men-accused-of-killing-his-brother-on-911
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/i-felt-nothing-for-them-canadian-faces-the-men-accused-of-killing-his-brother-on-911#commentsTue, 27 Aug 2013 22:06:08 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=356653

When Canadian Stephan Gerhardt walked into a Guantanamo Bay courtroom to face five men accused of killing his brother and thousands of others in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, he didn’t know if he would feel anger, hate or sadness.

Instead, “I felt nothing for them,” he said.

Mr. Gerhardt is the first Canadian to attend pretrial hearings at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base for five defendants in the Sept. 11 attacks. The co-accused prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind, face charges of terrorism and almost 3,000 counts of murder for their alleged roles in planning and aiding in the attacks.

“I wanted to see these people. I wanted to see the people that were responsible for taking Ralph from us,” said Mr. Gerhardt, who is now a business owner in Washington DC. “I looked at them and [thought] these are just criminals that are in court, having their hearing.”

Mr. Gerhardt’s younger brother Ralph was murdered on Sept. 11 when hijackers flew commercial airplanes into the World Trade Centre. He worked on the 105th floor of Tower One and was 34 when he died. His remains have never been recovered.

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Throughout the week, Mr. Gerhardt spent seven hours each day in a galley at the back of the courtroom. He sat with four other families whose loved ones were killed in the attacks. A lottery determined which families could attend the hearings.

The defendants sat with their backs to the victim’s families but cameras projected close-up images of the prisoners’ faces on screens.

“They were so consumed with hatred and death and destruction and the lack of value of life, you know, it just made them small people,” Mr. Gerhardt said. “They didn’t strike me as significant.”

Last week’s round of pretrial hearings involved defence lawyers’ arguments to dismiss terrorism and conspiracy charges against their clients. There was also debate over issues surrounding how classified information would be handled. Prosecutors are asking for a tentative trial date of July 2014, but the judge did not address the motion during the proceedings.

Mr. Gerhardt said he and the other families felt strongly that the men deserve a fair trial. He was glad that defence lawyers were fighting “tooth and nail” for their clients.

“We want these people to have the best defence that they can get, because when they get a ruling, I don’t want anyone to say ‘They didn’t have a good day in court, they didn’t get a fair trial,’” he said. “Granted, we want them to be found guilty…”

Handout photoStephan (left) and younger brother Ralph Gerhardt (right). It was taken around christmas 2000. Stephan says it is one of the last pictures taken of the two brothers.

In terms of being the only Canadian at the pretrial hearings, he said his presence represented the global significance of the 9/11 attacks. “This was not just an American event,” he said.

His experiences on the trip, including speaking with defence lawyers about their clients, also highlighted for him the stark contrast between the philosophies of the defendants and the beliefs he was raised with in Canada.

“It’s sad that there’s so much hate and so much anger just because we’re different,” he said. “As a Canadian, I’ve never really been exposed to that because we were always such an open society and everybody was welcome.”

Mr. Gerhardt and his brother grew up in Toronto and both moved to the United States in adulthood. He describes his brother as a passionate, vibrant and smart young man who lived a good life, went shark diving and “drove a little too fast sometimes.”

Even though more than a decade has passed since the attacks, 9/11 is still fresh in his mind. “It’s something I live each day,” he said.

The pretrial hearing was a particularly personal experience and Mr. Gerhardt said he thought of his brother “constantly.”

“I always will remember him as my kid brother. You know, that wonderful friend that you have from day one who’s also a pain in the neck, but also someone you don’t want to be without.”

A judge who has presided over most of the litigation stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks will decide whether the owners of the World Trade Center can try to make aviation companies pay billions of dollars in damages.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said he will announce his decision immediately after hearing several witnesses and listening to arguments in a nonjury trial starting Monday and expected to last three days.

The trial will decide whether World Trade Center Properties and its affiliates can receive more than the $4.9 billion in insurance proceeds they have already recovered since the 9/11 attacks by terrorists who hijacked commercial airliners and flew them into the 110-story twin towers. The attacks led to the destruction of the towers as well as a third trade center building.

If the judge should decide that the World Trade Center owners were entitled to additional money, a liability trial might occur. The defendants include American Airlines Inc., AMR Corp., United Airlines Inc., US Airways Inc., Colgan Air Inc., Boeing Co. and the Massachusetts Port Authority, among others.

Julio Cortez / AP PhotoOne World Trade Center stands at its full height above the New York City skyline in this view from the Heights neighborhood of Jersey City, N.J. A 408-foot spire was set into place at the top of the structure Friday, making the building a symbolic 1,776 feet tall.

The airlines and other aviation-related companies were sued with the reasoning that they were negligent, allowing terrorists to board airplanes and overtake their crews before plunging the planes into the trade center complex, destroying three buildings.

Hellerstein has already said the maximum the trade center owners could recover from aviation defendants would be $3.5 billion. The trade center owners say it has cost more than $7 billion to replace the twin towers and more than $1 billion to replace the third trade center building that fell.

In court papers, both sides have accused the other of unfairly characterizing their claims, with the aviation defendants saying the trade center owners were being “absurd” and the complex’s owners labeling some of the aviation defendants’ arguments as “nonsense.”

The aviation defendants say Hellerstein should conclude that the trade center owners are entitled to no award because they’ve already been reimbursed by insurance companies for the same damage they are trying to force aviation defendants to pay for as well. They also note that the replacement buildings are more modern and fancy than the original buildings.

Of the 7 World Trade Center building – the first to be rebuilt after the attacks – the lawyers wrote that the trade center owners “built a new, state of the art `green’ building that bears little resemblance to the office building that collapsed as a result of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.”

They said they plan to call only two witnesses: an expert on law and economics and an expert in the adjustment of insurance claims. Additional evidence they will introduce will include leases, insurance policies, proof of loss, communications between trade center leaseholders and their insurers, and financial statements.

In their court papers, the trade center’s owners insist that recovering money from aviation defendants would not result in a “double recovery” because of the billions they’ve already received from insurers. And they note that their rebuilding costs “far exceed” what they’ve received from insurers.

AP Photo/Chao Soi CheongSmoke billows from World Trade Center Tower 1 and flames explode from Tower 2 as it is struck by American Airlines Flight 175, when terrorists crashed hijacked airliners into the buildings Sept. 11 2001. A trial commencing in New York on Monday, July 15, 2013 will decide whether World Trade Center owners can seek additional damages from several airlines and other aviation defendants.

WASHINGTON — Confined to the basement of a CIA secret prison in Romania about a decade ago, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, asked his jailers whether he could embark on an unusual project: Would the spy agency allow Mohammed, who had earned his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering, to design a vacuum cleaner?

The agency officer in charge of the prison called CIA headquarters and a manager approved the request, a former senior CIA official told The Associated Press.

Mohammed had endured the most brutal of the CIA’s harsh interrogation methods and had confessed to a career of atrocities. But the agency had no long-term plan for him. Someday, he might prove useful. Perhaps, he’d even stand trial one day.

And for that, he’d need to be sane.

“We didn’t want them to go nuts,” the former senior CIA official said, one of several who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the now-shuttered CIA prisons or Mohammed’s interest in vacuums.

So, using schematics from the Internet as his guide, Mohammed began re-engineering one of the most mundane of household appliances.

That the CIA may be in possession of the world’s most highly classified vacuum cleaner blueprints is but one peculiar, lasting byproduct of the controversial U.S. detention and interrogation program.

By the CIA’s own account, the program’s methods were “designed to psychologically `dislocate'” people. But once interrogations stopped, the agency had to try to undo the psychological damage inflicted on the detainees.

The CIA apparently succeeded in keeping Mohammed sane. He appears to be in good health, according to military records.

Others haven’t fared as well. Accused al-Qaida terrorists Ramzi Binalshibh and Abd al-Nashiri, who were also locked up in Poland and Romania with Mohammed, have had mental issues. Al-Nashiri suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Binalshibh is being treated for schizophrenia with a slew of anti-psychotic medications.

“Any type of prolonged isolation in custody – much less the settings described in the press – have been known to have a severe impact on the mental condition of the detainee,” said Thomas Durkin, Binalshibh’s former civilian lawyer. Durkin declined to discuss Binalshibh’s case.

Mohammed was subjected to harsh interrogations in Poland. Agency officers and contractors forced him to stay awake for 180 hours, according to a CIA inspector general’s report. He also underwent 183 instances of waterboarding, or simulated drowning.

After the CIA prison in Poland was closed in September 2003, Mohammed was moved to Bucharest, to a black site code-named “Britelite.” Soon the CIA was trying to find ways to entertain Mohammed as his intelligence value diminished.

The prison had a debriefing room, where Mohammed, who saw himself as something of a professor, held “office hours,” as he told CIA officers. While chained to the floor, Mohammed would lecture the CIA officers on his path to jihad, his childhood and family. Tea and cookies were served.

AP Photo, FileFILE - This undated file photo shows the National Registry Office for Classified Information, also known as ORNISS, in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the center of Romania’s capital city of Bucharest.

Along with the other five detainees at the prison in Bucharest, Mohammed was given assignments about his knowledge of al-Qaida, or “homework,” as CIA officers called it. He was given Snickers candy bars as rewards for his studiousness.

In Romania, the prison provided books for detainees to read. Mohammed, former officials said, enjoyed the Harry Potter series. For the CIA officers at the prison, not so much. For security reasons, after a prisoner finished a book, they tediously checked every page to ensure detainees weren’t passing messages. They once caught Mohammed trying to hide a message in a book warning his prison mates not to talk about Osama bin Laden’s courier.

Mohammed graduated from North Carolina AT&T State University with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986. It’s not clear whether Mohammed was interested in designing a better vacuum or had ulterior motives. He might have intended to use the plans to conceal secret information or trick his jailers.

In Graham Greene’s spy thriller “Our Man in Havana,” a vacuum salesman in Cuba agrees to work for MI6, the British spy service. He dupes the British into believing his vacuum designs are military installations. The AP was unable to determine whether Mohammed ever read the famous novel.

It remains a mystery how far Mohammed got with his designs or whether the plans still exist. The secret CIA prison in Romania was shuttered in early 2006 and Mohammed was transferred later that year to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base prison, where he remains. It’s unlikely he was able to take his appliance plans to Cuba.

Mohammed’s military lawyer, Jason Wright, said he was prohibited from discussing his client’s interest in vacuums.

“It sounds ridiculous, but answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, a Swiffer design, or even a design for a better hand towel would apparently expose the U.S. government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger,” Wright said.

But Wright added that he often discussed “modern technological innovations” and the “scientific wonders” of the Quran with Mohammed. He called Mohammed “exceptionally intelligent.”

“If he had access to educational programs in Guantanamo Bay, such as distance learning programs, I am confident that in addition to furthering his Islamic studies, he could obtain a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, and very likely patent inventions,” Wright said.

The CIA won’t discuss the Mohammed’s vacuum plans, either. The AP asked the CIA for copies of the vacuum designs or any government records about them under the Freedom of Information Act.

The CIA responded in a letter to the AP that the records, “should they exist,” would be considered operational files of the CIA – among its most highly classified category of government files – and therefore exempt from ever being released to the public.

On September 11, 2001, religious terrorists murdered almost 3,000 people including Christians, atheists, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and many others from different faiths.

In New York City, the Twin Towers were constructed with steel crossbeams, and after the towers fell, thousands of the beams were seen in the rubble. One Christian rescue worker selected a crossbeam and attached religious symbolism to it. He suggested that this specific crossbeam was not scrap metal like all the others, but was a sign from heaven, “a promise from God that he is with us even in the face of terrible evil and untold suffering.”

The decorated crossbeam was seized by Father Brian Jordan, a Roman Catholic Franciscan priest, and a religious relic was invented. During the next 10 years, the 17-foot cross was moved, repaired, mounted and copied. Religious services were held in front of it at St. Paul’s Chapel. Worshippers further modified it, carving “JESUS” on the top and etching prayers on the side. The cross was labeled unique, a sign from the Christian god, not merely a crossbeam plucked from the rubble of a terrorist attack. Then the cross became profitable –purchasable through church gift shops and Web sites.

The cross was installed in the World Trade Center (WTC) Memorial in a religious ceremony in 2011 led by Father Jordan. He then consecrated the public land on which the memorial is built, and the cross was lowered in. That same year, American Atheists sued for the removal of the cross as a religious symbol or for the WTC board to approve an atheist memorial alongside to remember the nonbelievers who died on 9/11.